


Autumn Dreaming :: Cultural Exchanges

by Nell65



Series: Autumn Dreams [10]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Universe, Dinner Parties, Gen, post season two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 14:23:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4790564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nell65/pseuds/Nell65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dinner parties - food, wine, gossip, family, a little diplomacy, what could go wrong?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Autumn Dreaming :: Cultural Exchanges

**Author's Note:**

> Definitely not going to happen. Still having fun.

“Clark, the bus is here.” Harper knocked on her doorframe. “Time to go.”

“Arggh.” Clarke scrubbed at her face. “Don’t wanna.”

“I know. But,” Harper waved her hands and made a spooky voice, “we’ve been summoned.”

“I’m working.” Clarke picked up her charcoal again. 

“Your plant studies aren’t going anywhere, and winter is coming. There’s no rush to finish.”

“Yes. There is. We need to know, before planting season. What’s the same. What’s different. The Mountain’s data doesn’t help. They never planted outside. This is important.”

“Clarke,” Harper put her hands gently over Clarke’s, “Stop.”

Clarke looked at Harper’s hands, strong and capable and with her nails bitten down to the quick and cuticles bloody from picking at them. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t.”

“Bring your sketchpad and your pencil case. You can make rough sketches on the way. Places you want to visit later.”

Irritation shot through her and she shook off Harper’s hands and put down her charcoal. “I’m not a child, Harper. You don’t need to talk to me like one.”

“Then don’t act like it,” Harper snapped. “We have to go back to the Mountain for psych evals. If we don’t, they won’t let us stay here at Jaha.”

“Fine.” Clarke bounced to her feet. “Right. Yes. I understand, in my head,” Clarke said, shoving an extra sweater and her sketchbook along with her data pad into a satchel. “Holding to the regular schedule for sessions is important. Even necessary. But, why do we have to go back to the Mountain? Why can’t the tests come to us? It’s mostly all online anyway.”

“I assume you don’t want me to tell you what you already know,” Harper said, turning to walk with her down the hallway to the new stairwell that led down to the ground floor of the Ark.

“Yeah,” Clarke made a face, “They can’t run all of the psych health exams at a distance and they don’t trust anyone at Jaha not to lie to them for us.”

“Hey, if they are as efficient as last time, we won’t have to stay the night. We can catch the last bus back here.”

“You know there is No Way,” Clarke emphasized the capital letters, “my mom is going to let me go without staying for dinner and,” she held up her fingers for the quotes marks, “ ‘family time’.”

Too late, she remembered that Harper’s family was dead. Lost in the environmental breach after Diana Sydney’s theft of the Exodus Ship.

“Sorry,” she said, as she impulsively reached out to clasp Harper’s hand. “That was stupid.”

Harper squeezed back for a barely discernable second, then pulled away. “Yeah. It was. But,” she offered Clarke a wry smile, “I understand.”

“Why don’t you have dinner and stay with us? My mom ended up with a ridiculously big apartment.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“Okay.”

Once Clarke climbed on the small bus, she nearly turned and fled. Jasper Jordan was slouching in the far back, staring morosely out the window. He flicked his eyes at the newcomers, saw it was her, and went back to staring out the window, only now with ten times more rigidity and glaring.

Clarke ducked into the first seat, right behind the driver. Harper offered her a sympathetic glance, but went back to sit with Jasper. Clarke was lucky, she reminded herself, that Harper was willing to talk with her at all. Jasper refused to even look at her. Which was better, she reflected, than at least some of the alternatives. 

According to Harper and some of the other delinquents who were there to see it, Jasper had actually tried to attack Bellamy after they’d burned the remains of the Mountain Men. He was wild with anger once he realized that they’d thrown Maya’s body into the fire along with all the rest, hadn’t separated her out for a more dignified burial. Only, Bellamy had exploded right back in his face, bellowing that if Jasper was too special a snowflake to shovel shit with the rest, he didn’t get to complain about how they took out the trash. 

It went downhill from there. 

Harper said she thought the only reason Bellamy hadn’t actually beaten Jasper to death was because, in his heart, he didn’t really want too. 

That was why Bellamy had pretty much stayed away from Jaha ever since. That, and his new rank. He was back in the Guard. Brevet Major Bellamy Blake. Which put him in command of the patrols that were learning the shape and boundaries of Mt. Weather’s territory. 

Or got sent him away on special missions. Like retrieving John Murphy, and whatever the hell it was he’d learned while off on his own adventures. 

Figured, Clark thought resentfully, that Murphy would end up in a luxury bunker still fully powered up and stocked with booze, food, cigars, and reams of electronic entertainment while she ended up in a decrepit, cleaned-out cabin with nothing but a broken down stove and pile of punky wood for company.

Her evals went smoothly enough. She didn’t get a report of glowing mental health, but she passed. Dinner wasn’t looking so bad either. Her mom had thoughtfully avoided too much family time by inviting a half dozen other people and turning it into bit of a party. Marcus Kane was there, along with Raven Reyes and Kyle Wick, Megan Paez, who was an old friend of Clarke’s from school who’d somehow survived everything so far, David Miller, and, jaw-dropingly, Indra of the Woods Clan.

Indra was visiting her son. His recovery from the Cerberus program was not going well. He’d been enslaved as a reaper by the Mountain for almost six months, longer than any other survivor. That he was even alive at all was a testament to his strength, of body and mind. But, once off the drugs, he was a wasted shell of a man. It had taken a long time for him to recover enough to even stand on his own. He refused to speak any English, or really, to anyone not from his own clan. Not even Lincoln, whom he shunned as an outsider. He refused to join other former reapers at Camp Jaha. In fact, he refused to leave the clinic at all. Indra visited as often as she could, which given her responsibilities in getting the survivors of TonDC ready for the coming winter, wasn’t very much. The rest of the time, he lay in his bed, staring at a blank wall. 

When Clarke opened her mother’s door to find Indra standing there, clutching a wooden bowl holding a round loaf of bread, she’d frozen in shock. Indra looked equally stunned. Kane had come to their rescue, clapping his hand on Clarke’s shoulder, a hearty, “Indra, so nice to see you here,” falling from his lips. He drew them both inside, took the bread from Indra’s hands, put a drink in them and so thoroughly acted the host that Clarke began to suspect that as much as avoiding family time, there was some kind of diplomacy thing going on as well. 

Indra, Clarke realized over supper, out of her terrifying warrior gear and eye paint, wearing a softly flowing blue tunic over matching trousers, was actually a strikingly beautiful woman. Her hands, not holding a knife or a sword, were long and elegant, as were her gestures as she spoke. 

Clarke wondered how she’d never noticed that before. What with all the trying to kill each other shit going on, no doubt, she thought drily to herself.

Kane had steered the conversation around to the Ice Nation, but in the form of asking about customs and folkways, sharing one or two from the Ark for every morsel Indra choked out about the clans. 

They were talking about marriage rules when Indra said, “It’s true that marriages and children can bind groups together. But it can also simply lead to losing your strongest children to rivals, strengthening them, weakening yourselves. You should be careful the Azgeda don’t take your Bellamy Blake for their own. He is very strong. He commands much respect among your people and ours. He would be a prize.”

“Do the clans force marriage for treaties?” Colonel Miller asked.

“No.” Indra shook her head firmly. “Children for us are too precious to be the result of force. But for the Azgeda, that would not be a problem, yes?” Indra smiled broadly. “Echo has already claimed him.”

“What?” Clarke exclaimed, before she’d had time to think better of it.

Everyone but Indra suddenly found something terribly interesting to look at on his or her plate. Indra looked around, confused, then at Clarke, sympathetically.

“Ah,” she said. “I apologize. That news should not have come from me.”

“No,” Clarke said, nodding her head at Indra, then turning to glare at her mother’s bent head. “It should not.” She included everyone else in glare. “Why didn’t anyone say anything? I don’t know how many times I asked how Bellamy was doing, and every single one of you looked me straight in the eye and said,” and here Clarke adopted a breathless, stupid, babyish voice, “Oh, you know. He’s had it rough. But he’s doing okay.” 

Back in her normal tone she added, “I knew something was off, but figured I’d ask him myself when he got back.”

“Well,” Raven said with a winning smile, “that’s true? He has had it rough but he is also doing more or less okay. He’s just also ba-,” she coughed, “sleeping with Echo. Ice Nation. She’s the one who held a man down so Bellamy could choke him to death with his bare hands, then later he let her out of the cages and gave her the keys for the rest. When the Mountain fell.”

There was an awkward pause.

Clark cleared her throat. “Is it casual, or serious?”

“Since they’ve been more or less joined at the hip for months?” Kyle said, “I’m gonna go with,” he made a thoughtful face, “not-casual.”

“It will be,” and Indra side-eyed Wick, “not-casual to her aunt, Queen Nia.”

After that Indra was comparatively forthcoming, explaining best she could how the clans handled things like puberty and sexual attraction, the fine distinctions they drew between exploration, sex for fun or stress relief, formal courtship and marriage, and something she translated, badly she assured them, as star crossed agony. None of them were completely fixed categories. Lincoln and Octavia had been the latter, for example, but seemed to be moving toward something more like what the clans accepted as marriage, she explained. 

“And Lexa and Costia?” Clarke asked. “Where did they fit?”

Indra raised her brow. “She told you of Costia?”

“Yes.”

“Star crossed agony. From beginning to end. Intense young love torn apart by war and death instead of fading properly with time.”

“Does Bellamy know any of this?” Clarke asked, looking around the table. “Or is he riding into disaster blind?”

“I have no idea,” her mother replied. “I hope Lincoln and Matyn explained it all to him, if Echo hadn’t already. And we do know they were allowed to pass through to the east. They’re with John Murphy right now. All of them.”

“I spoke with Nathan last night, when they reported in,” Colonel Miller added, “and he didn’t mention any special concerns about their journey back. Losing Bellamy to the Azgeda, that would be a special concern.”

Raven cleared her throat. “I’m not sure we have to be that worried. Echo is,” she bit her lip, struggling for words. After a second or two, she said, “Echo is not really warm and cuddly, okay? Or even,” she shrugged apologetically in Indra’s direction, “very likable? I’m not sure how much Bellamy even, you know, likes-her likes her. Like outside of sleeping with her. Or how much she likes him either. She’s rude and dismissive to everyone, even him half the time, and he slings the shit right back at her. She won’t talk to anyone she doesn’t think has enough status. She’s queen of the mean girls big time.”

“She might just be shy,” Megan said, surprising everyone. “She’s always very polite at the library.” When everyone stared at her, she flushed but explained. “I work there, most afternoons. She hangs out there, a lot, when he isn’t around. Reads all kinds of things. Children’s stories, old science textbooks, National Geographic magazines. She was reading her way through a pile of Raymond Chandler’s work not long before they left.”

“Studying her enemies,” Indra said, nodding approvingly. “Well trained warrior, that one.”

“If we’re her enemies, why would she want Bellamy?” Kane asked.

“Because he is your champion. If he becomes hers instead, she wins.”

“He called her a bitch, to her face, in public, the morning they left because she was being such a dick to Monroe. If she wants him on a more permanent basis, she’s got work to do,” Raven said.

“Bellamy won’t abandon his people,” Clarke said. “Not now. Not ever.”

Indra shrugged. “If he comes back to the Mountain, you’ll know where his allegiance lies. So will the Azgeda.”


End file.
